Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
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After the N-word row, another finger-wagging assault on poor old Mark Twain – for smoking

It is heartening that there has been such a mass allergic reaction to an American professor’s decision to excise the word “nigger” from a new edition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Many thinkers and bloggers are understandably aghast at this Ministry of Truth-style fiddling with a classic text. And yet, there was recently another instance of Twain-related censorship that raised barely an eyebrow, far less giving rise to angry editorials or gobsmacked commentary in the blogosphere.

In this Twain-targeting censorship, it was not the word “nigger” that was airbrushed from history, but a cigar. In recent years, Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight! – a one-man show in which Holbrook dolls himself up to look like Twain and recites his classic texts – has become increasingly difficult to stage, even impossible in some American states. Why? Because Holbrook spends virtually the entire 90 minutes of the play chomping on a cigar, just as Twain did for most of his life, and these days smoking in public is considered even more morally depraved than uttering the N-word.

Holbrook has been performing Mark Twain Tonight! for a remarkable 56 years, both on Broadway and at theatres big and small across the US. And given that Twain was a serious devotee of cigar-smoking – “Given the choice between a woman and a cigar, I will always choose the cigar”, he once said – Holbrook’s show involves copious amounts of puffing. That’s a non-starter, however, in places where the ban on smoking extends even to that arena where the state’s grubby fingers surely should not reach: the theatre.

In 2007, Holbrook regretfully cancelled a performance of his show in Denver because the local authorities refused him permission to smoke on stage. He was outraged. “Whoever makes the conclusion that there is not a reason for a character to smoke on stage seems to have no concept of the requirements of creating a character”, he said. In other venues around the US, he has reluctantly – and very unhappily – agreed to play Twain sans cigar. It’s like Huck Finn sans “nigger”. The refusal to allow an actor playing Twain to smoke a cigar is as much an act of censorship, as much a kick in the eye to freedom of artistic expression, as the erasing of niggers and Injuns from Twain’s texts.

Across America, and in parts of Europe too, plays are being cancelled, self-censored or even rewritten to get around art-stopping smoking bans. Works by writers as diverse as Henrik Ibsen and Noel Coward have been shelved because – horror of horrors! – one or two of their characters smoke. As a small art mag in the US put it, “public health is trumping freedom of expression”. Indeed. And it is testament to the powerful grip of today’s tyranny of health, of the idea that the state has the right to ban or punish our unhealthy antics, that censorship in the name of stubbing out the evil weed causes little or no controversy. Twain should be allowed to say “nigger”, and people playing Twain should be allowed to smoke cigars.